A Strange But Effective Villainess Life - Chapter 201

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com

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Commemoration of Webtoon Adaptation
Side Story Episode 4
IF Side Story. A Small Rebellion of Unrequited Love
The year Antesiani turned six years old.
With a click, the photograph was taken.
Kiana, Edmund, and Antesiani—all three smiled with happiness, their faces perfectly captured in a single photograph.
“Wow, Mom and Dad and me—we’re all here!”
Antesiani adored the photograph the moment she received it. She immediately rushed to place it right at the head of her bed.
And so in her bedroom, there now lay four photographs in a neat row: two individual portraits of the young princess, one photograph of her with Piyak, and one family photograph of all three of them together.
“Now that I think about it, this is the first photograph we’ve taken as three.”
Edmund asked as he gently stroked his daughter’s head.
“Is that why you’re so happy?”
Piyak answered first to that question.
【Of course! It’s a photograph with all the family members I love!】
Antesiani smiled brightly and said.
“That’s not it. You’re not in this one, Piyak. Not everyone is in it.”
At those words, Piyak trembled with emotion, fluttering his wings.
【My goodness…】
Tears welled up in Piyak’s eyes.
【To think I’d hear such words from Kiana’s daughter… Piyak is so deeply moved!】
Piyak, breathing heavily with emotion, pressed his entire body against Antesiani’s cheek.
【Then we should place a photograph of all four of us next to these!】
But Antesiani slowly shook her head.
“No, that won’t work.”
【What?】
“Next to this one, we need a photograph with five people in it.”
【…What?】
“There’s a rule. An addition rule.”
A brief silence fell.
Kiana, who had been reading a new research paper without saying a word beside them, finally looked up.
“Ah, that’s called the Fibonacci sequence.”
Piyak’s beak fell open in a look of complete disinterest. Kiana continued her explanation undeterred.
“1, 1, 2, 3, 5. It’s a regular sequence of numbers created by adding the previous numbers together. So the next one should have five people, right?”
“Fi… Fibo, what did you say?”
“You’re still too young for the name itself to matter. If you’ve named it the addition rule, then that’s what it is.”
Kiana gave a crisp explanation and then clapped her hands once.
“Anyway, we’ll need to take a photograph with five people now. After that, how many will we need?”
“Eight people!”
Mother and daughter faced each other with bright smiles and laughed.
Piyak, all his emotion drained away, muttered with a pained expression.
【I wish Magical Engineering would collapse.】
After that, Kiana actually recruited the five people who would appear in the next photograph. Piyak, deeply wounded in spirit, declared that he would not be photographed.
“In the end, it doesn’t matter who appears. Let’s just photograph anyone. Two researchers who came to work today, just anyone….”
Kiana spoke as if it were of no consequence.
It was Edmund who hastily brought the situation to a close.
“B-but this photograph will be placed in Sia’s bedroom. We can’t just use ‘anyone’—it should be someone truly important to us….”
“Is that so? But Sia wants to take it quickly….”
Edmund quickly selected two more ‘important people’ from the Imperial Palace.
They were the Emperor, who was always present in the Imperial Palace, and Seliet, who had temporarily entered the palace due to matters concerning the Greenhouse left behind by her biological mother, the 5th Empress.
“Come now, let’s take it quickly. Grandfather and Aunt are certainly important people.”
Thus, a family photograph was hastily created with two additional people.
Kiana shrugged her shoulders and murmured.
“Well, it turned out that all the direct line of the Tailies Imperial Family were captured in this photograph.”
Hitten had been stripped of the Tailies surname. So, as Kiana said, the Emperor, Edmund, Seliet, and Antesiani were the entirety of the direct Tailies Imperial line.
Then Antesiani, who had received the photograph, suddenly tilted her head in puzzlement.
“…Hmm?”
Her expression showed that something very significant had occurred to her from Kiana’s thoughtless remark.
The child’s round blue eyes turned toward her affectionate father.
Then she carefully traced Edmund’s black hair and golden eyes once more.
“Um, Dad.”
Antesiani, looking at the photograph again, asked with an innocent expression.
“Why do you look so different from everyone else? Aunt, Grandfather, and I all have blue eyes.”
Antesiani’s question left everyone momentarily shocked. Edmund could not bring himself to tell his young daughter that ‘I did it while hiding my identity and pursuing revenge thoroughly.’
After a brief silence, Kiana spoke.
“Your father became a test subject for your mother’s experiments. She created a magical artifact that changes eye color.”
“Wow! Then I want to change my eyes to gold too!”
“That’s not allowed. It hurts terribly. It hurts more than injections.”
Kiana shook her head and spoke firmly.
“Your father said it hurt so much that he doesn’t want to change his eye color anymore. That’s why he can’t go back to blue eyes.”
“What about his hair?”
“That’s personal preference. When you grow up, dye your hair whatever color you want.”
“Wow, then I’ll do rainbow colors!”
For now, that conversation ended there.
* * *
That night.
Kiana carefully asked Edmund.
“Ed, are you not thinking of changing your appearance again? Like you used to?”
The permanently dyed black hair could simply be changed back to silver with permanent dye again. Changing eye color would be incredibly painful, but it wasn’t impossible.
However, Edmund answered without a moment’s hesitation, firmly and decisively.
“No.”
He brushed the inside of Kiana’s arm while whining softly, “Why? Don’t you like me as I am now?”
“Why? Don’t you like me the way I am now?”
“It’s not that. It’s just… in a way, your current appearance isn’t the ‘real you’…”
“Hmm. What is this ‘real me’ you’re talking about?”
Edmund furrowed his brow slightly and asked in a playful tone mixed with a sigh.
“That foolish, chubby boy from childhood?”
His lazy voice carried subtle seduction, yet tinged with resentment.
“The gluttonous Crown Prince who couldn’t make the slightest impression on the woman he secretly loved? You think that’s the ‘real’ me?”
Kiana answered without hesitation.
“No. I was simply referring to the genetic information you possessed from birth.”
“…”
“Actually, not from birth, but from the moment you were conceived in the Empress’s womb—that would be more precise.”
At Kiana’s serious response, Edmund shook his head rapidly.
“…You don’t need to be that precise. There’s no need to trace origins that far back.”
He hastily salvaged the conversation and pulled her into his embrace. Holding her body firmly, he brought his lips to her neck and murmured.
“I’ll live my entire life with the appearance you loved. My ‘real’ appearance already has a glorious record of failure.”
“Failure? I didn’t even know you liked me back then. If you’d expressed yourself properly, it could have succeeded then too.”
“That would’ve been impossible—how could I have expressed it? You know who you liked back then, don’t you?”
She twisted her body from the tickling sensation but answered confidently.
“Yes. Lord Rodrigo, the man whose eyes you destroyed. Come to think of it, Lord Rodrigo was your closest friend at the time, so it would’ve been difficult to express yourself in any way. I’ll admit that.”
Since Lord Rodrigo had also acted as if he wouldn’t push Kiana away, it was inevitable that it would appear as though Edmund was stealing his friend’s lover.
The more Edmund recalled that period, the deeper his desperate possessiveness became.
Despite already having her by his side, his affection was always parched, like drinking seawater. Eventually, Edmund—who had left red marks on Kiana’s neck—let out a heavy sigh.
“…What if I had confessed my feelings to you even just once back then?”
His golden eyes slowly grew melancholic.
“Now that I think about it, there was one chance for awakening. But I passed it by without even realizing it was an opportunity.”
“Awakening?”
“Yes.”
Still holding Kiana without letting go, Edmund began to slowly recall the past.
“Spring when I was sixteen…A Gypsy approached me once.”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com

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